The present invention generally relates to use of industrial pick and place robots or assembly robots for use in homes or restaurants such as in a robotic robot vision supervisor without requiring expert robot technicians to conduct services and maintenance activities as done in a factory setup.
A need exists for industrial quality robots suitable for use by average home consumers as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 9,643,324 for use in a robot vision supervisor for automated home cooking as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 9,131,807.
Industrial robots are calibrated using homing and limit sensors from time to time or routinely which are also part of preventative maintenance schedules. Anytime a robot is unable to carry a pick and place or assembly activity or hits an obstacle in its motion path, a failure is detected, reported by operators or anomalies like a dropped or missing part in the next step of a manufacturing process or an over torque fault on a motor when robot end effector has an unexpected hit or runs into an obstacle.
Any such failure events result in summoning of a skilled operator or a maintenance technician who is trained in homing the robot's axes by manually guiding the robot axes to their home position and recalibrating using the home sensors as they may be out of calibration or robot controller lost their coordinates due to motions caused by outside forces as in a collision including belt slips, clutch slips, permanently deflected structural members. A technician may use any means to guide the robot back to its homing positions but use their senses including eyes to make sure that the robot does not run into any additional issues in the process of homing. Once homed the technician may also manually guide the robot to conduct some of its tasks usually in a teach mode often using a teach pendant or a joystick device to confirm it's corrected and in good health.
When an industrial robot is placed into a home for use by average home consumers or restaurants as necessitated due to the desired tasks like cooking requiring industrial grade systems as opposed to some other robotic toys, any events such as a collision can render the product out of order and users will need to call a qualified service technician. A collision can occur when say a home user places an Unidentified Foreign Object or an UFO into the motion path of the robot or its end effector. Further such events will occur on a frequent basis at homes due to use in a relatively uncontrolled task environment with unskilled users as opposed to in a disciplined industrial floor with only trained users interacting with the robots. Even a single failure event on a weekly basis will cause the pick and place robots extremely expensive to own and operate negating their use and adoption.
A need therefore exists to provide a vision system for supervising an industrial robot for use with home consumer robots by eliminating the need of frequent calls to service technicians when the robot goes out of calibration due to unforeseen events such as a collision of robot end effector with a foreign object or UFO in its workspace.
Further, a need exists for a robot vision supervisor that can guide back the axes of the robot back to its home position to use the home calibration sensors for accurate recalibration from time to time to verify health of its positioning capability. Further the home use robot vision supervisor can check the position errors after a failure to detect health of overall positioning and if any damage was occurred.